EPA, what next after AKOBEN?

Ghanaians were very much startled by the findings of a recent Environmental Protection Agency- EPA’s report that was made public last week. The report dubbed: AKOBEN, which has evolved through various stages, “is an environmental performance rating disclosure” of EPA.

AKOBEN enables EPA to assess the environmental performance of mining and manufacturing companies in the country. This, the EPA does, by using a five-colour-coding rating scheme.

The colours are gold, green, blue, orange and red showing the environmental performance of companies ranging from excellent to poor.

The interpretation of the colours is as follows: red- poor which indicates that a company has been very reckless in respect of the environment; orange- unsatisfactory; blue – good; green – very good; and gold – excellent shows that a company has followed its corporate social responsibility policies.

But significantly enough, and for us at Today, the disclosure of the 2009 AKOBEN report is extremely worrying by all standards and a matter that must engage our attention, first, as a people, and second, as a nation. The report rated almost all the multi-national mining and manufacturing companies with colour red, showing that they, in one way or the other, created risks from toxics and hazardous wastes and mismanagement and discharges.

It is instructive to say that the protection of biodiversity is one essential ingredient to fighting poverty in our country. It is obvious that majority of our citizens live in the rural areas and whose economic dependence is mainly on biodiversity. Therefore permitting mining companies to continuously destroy our environment is in a way impoverishing them the more. Do we for once even pause to reflect on the foodstuff from mining areas to Accra and other cities?

Speaking at the launch of the report, Environment, Science and Technology Minister, Ms. Sherry Ayittey, described the development as sad. The exact words of the minister were captured in her speech- a portion of which reads: “… it is sad to note that not a single company in the country received GOLD, GREEN or even BLUE in this year’s AKOBEN rating system undertaken by the EPA. This says a lot about the way corporate bodies treat the environment, especially in the way they dispose of their waste.”

Indeed, the minister cannot be far from right! What is happening on our environment front is an eye-sore and something that must be looked at critically. We need to have a system that will ensure that companies both in the extractive and manufacturing sectors do not continue to treat our environment with impunity.

For us on this paper we sincerely believe that EPA is not functioning effectively. At best the government agency could be described as a paper tiger which often runs away from its responsibilities.

With all due respect, we think EPA has taken too long a time to sanction and call to order some of these companies. We believe that if EPA had taken punitive actions against the wrongs of especially mining companies, we would not have gotten to a stage where they will careless of the environment.

The question we therefore leave for EPA is: After AKOBEN, EPA what is your next line of action? The public awaits your answer!